Time to Change Wales

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Background

Time to Change Wales (TTCW) is the first national campaign aiming to end the stigma and discrimination faced by people with mental health problems in Wales. They tasked us with creating a marketing campaign to help bring the issue to the fore. A campaign that would be different from the norm and buck conventions usually associated with typical, often humdrum health campaigns.

Their analysis showed that friends and family often don’t believe they are qualified, capable or strong enough to help someone with a mental health problem and instead choose to shy away or skirt around the topic, feeling unable to start a conversation about it.

How we helped

Although mental health problems are very common, affecting an astounding one in four people in the UK, it can still be a taboo subject. People who experience mental illness often face stigma and discrimination in the workplace, socially or within families. This can make life more difficult than the symptoms themselves. Our campaign aimed to demonstrate that you don’t need to be anything more than a friend to help someone with a mental health problem.

This issue formed the basis for our concept. A campaign to demonstrate that you don’t need to be anything more than a friend to help someone with a mental health problem.

Scenes were captured of everyday people doing normal things; having a cup of tea on the sofa, having a chat over coffee or a pint at the pub. Each featured two people; one with a mental health problem keen to discuss their problem, the other feeling completely out of their depth and imagining a type of person who would be more capable. They are portrayed dressed as this incarnation. We all have our own heroes so we selected a variety of aspirational characters chosen for their extreme physical, intellect or cultural prowess – be it a ninja, lion tamer, spaceman, gladiator, spy, fairy godmother, magician, rocket scientist or a superhero.

Just listen

As with any campaign, the first objective was to gain public attention and a mental health awareness campaign featuring adults dressed in costumes, in public places, certainly ticked that box. Yet look beyond the surface, and the character playing the fool is not the person with the mental health problem. An incorrect assumption so often made by those that misunderstand mental health issues. Read on and the story unfolds to reveal the underlying message that you don’t need to have heroic superpowers or a rocket scientist’s IQ to help a friend with an issue, you just need to be a friend. Just taking the time to stop, chat and listen can really make a difference.

We used real people who been affected themselves, allowing us to be able to focus each advert on key individuals that TTCW had helped over the years. These people are regarded as TTCW champions. However, arguably the real champions of this campaign were the friends, partners or family members that accompanied the models.

Mental illness can be a difficult issue to get people to engage with, but Limegreentangerine used their expertise and boundless creativity to transform our research into a campaign that grabbed the attention of the target audience, delivering our message powerfully and effectively. We wanted to start conversations and to that end and so much more, we were hugely successful. Helen Robinson, Social Marketing Lead Officer

Reach

To maximise the reach of the campaign, it was spread across a variety of traditional media including outdoor advertisements, bus, cinema and washroom adverts as well as the more unconventional canvas of chicken boxes. We also created a series of fun and quirky Twitter profile backgrounds and beer mats illustrating the heads of various aspirational characters in the hope that pub-goers would have fun, playing with them which may inadvertently spark conversation about the subject and spread the message furtively via posting photos on social media.

The response to the campaign has been phenomenal. Following launch, enquiries through the website alone increased by a whopping 400%.